November 6, 2011

Important travel and trade practices that have long formed extended exchange communities of Oceania will be the focus of the upcoming Moana Nui summit of Pacific Islanders to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii November 9, 10, and 11, 2011.

These practices are endangered by a proposed trade agreement comparable to NAFTA, but encompassing countries on the Pacific Rim rather than those in North America. The proposed agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), would have the same devastating impacts on local production networks, trading practices, and populations in the Pacific Rim, as NAFTA on jobs, farms, and other sectors in North America. The United States has drafted Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam into developing the TPP; the number of nations might increase as the conservative trade organization, Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), meets in Honolulu to attempt to finalize language for the TPP.

October 20, 2011

The Egyptian Democratic Academy in Cairo is one of the local organizations that made the Jasmine Revolution possible, educating Egyptians about alternatives to dictatorships and military rule under Mubarak. A recent story in The Nation describes one of the teachers at the Academy, a 25-year-old woman, Esraa Nouh, whose father was imprisoned under Mubarak for many years. Nouh believes in liberalism and John Stuart Mill, and teaches the history of liberalism beginning with the Greek origins (more on them in a moment) and John Locke, drawing a thread connecting that history to recent Egyptian political trends.

The irony is that J.S. Mill’s views on politics and economics were dominant in Britain and other countries at the height of the colonization of Egypt. In fact, John Locke was as strongly supportive of slavery as the Egyptian pharaohs were, which makes him even less of a pretender to democracy than Mubarak was. Locke’s profits from his investments in English slave trade ships led him to support private property as a central right in democratic representational governance.

September 14, 2011

Subaltern populations achieve autonomy in many ways under globalization and the War on Terror. Their sites of autonomy rarely come to global public awareness, but when they do they are shaped by the terms under which they make sense to largely bourgeois, news-viewing and academic readers and viewers. What other terms and logics might be useful for understanding subaltern autonomy?

September 6, 2011

Democracy has multiple lineages beyond that of the European Enlightenment, lineages which include collective practices of accountability and ethics of indigenous groups and subalterns past and present. As globalization and the War on Terror spread their destruction across the globe, democratic collectivities have come under siege in many ways, and are responding with their survival at stake. Those in the global north may learn from these responses about forms of democracy that have much to teach the world about possible futures for democracy.

At Democracies 2 Come we take seriously the possibility that subalterns living under the War on Terror and globalization may have something to contribute to the global understanding of democracy and freedom, dignity and justice. By taking them seriously as agents capable of intelligent analyses and democratically organized constructive responses to the War on Terror and globalization, we may move beyond seeing them only in terms of the status of victims needing rescue by foreign nations, multinational organizations like the IMF and the United Nations, micro-lending development schemes, and NGOs. Rural women and men with little schooling have much to say about economics and the War and its democratic claims in its many, many conflict zones, from Afghanistan to Yemen and regions beyond centralized national control.